ASSIMILATION POLICY

Both the United States and Canada developed
assimilation policies for their Native peoples.
Americans and Canadians both believed that
the only way to save the Indians from extinction,
and to make room for settlers, was to
locate Indians on reservations and convert
them into Christian, self-sufficient farmers,
complete with a European American sense of
individualism and private property ownership.
The paradox should be evident: spatial
segregation was supposed to lead to cultural
integration.

Although assimilation policies were evident
in early federal Indian policy and in treaties
with Plains Indians in the 1830s, the intensity
of the program deepened in the reservation
era after the Civil War. The United States applied
the policy to the Southern Plains tribes
at the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek
and to the northern tribes at the 1868 Treaty of
Fort Laramie. Tribal leaders were coerced into
agreeing to cede to the United States all but a
fraction of their land and to locate on reservations.
The treaties also committed the Indians
to send their children to government schools
and provided for the possibility of private
property in land. As compensation for the
land ceded, Indians were to receive annual
payments in cash and goods, as well as the
services of physicians, instructors in agriculture,
and other government aid. Similar
terms, with only details varying, were negotiated
with Plains Indians throughout the region
from the 1850s through the 1870s.

It was assumed that within decades the Indians
would become assimilated. The outcome
was far different. There was almost a
decade of bloody fighting before all of the
western Plains Indians were even located on
reservations, and they remained there only
because the bison had been nearly exterminated
by the late 1870s and early 1880s. Confined
to reservations, frequently hungry, and
oppressed by o.cials pressuring them to send
their children to school and abandon cherished
religious and social customs, Native
Americans led a miserable existence. Indian
men showed little interest in farming land that
would daunt a seasoned white farmer.

Real assimilation had not taken place by the
end of the reservation period. The Indian Office
then tried to legislate assimilation when it
introduced the allotment policy through the
General Allotment Act of 1887. Each Indian
was to be given a plot of land, generally 160
acres, on which to begin farming. Any remaining
reservation land was sold off as "surplus
lands." Congress was increasingly reluctant to
fund Indian programs, having been told for
decades that assimilation was imminent. In an
effort to make Indians more employable, the
government restructured education programs
to prepare the youth for entry-level jobs–the
girls as domestic servants and the boys as farmand
ranch hands and common laborers. The
contexts for this assimilative education were
day and boarding schools on reservations as
well as off-reservation boarding schools, such
as those at Genoa, Nebraska, and Haskell,
Kansas.

By the 1920s the failure of assimilation policies
was apparent. The United States had destroyed
one way of life, and the Indians were
struggling to salvage some of their cultures
and to survive. The abrogation of the allotment
policy in 1934 was recognition that it,
and assimilation, had failed.

In Canada developments were similar in
many respects. From 1871 to 1885, in a series of
seven treaties, the Canadian government acquired
Indian lands in the Prairie Provinces
and settled the Indians on reserves, where they
were put under pressure to assimilate. As was
the case in the United States, the Bible and the
plow were the principal instruments for assimilation.
Reserves were often smaller than
their equivalents in the United States, and religious
groups were more prominent in Indian
education. But again, as in the United
States, the rhetoric of the government's assimilation
policy was not matched by a genuine
commitment in investment: farming instructors
were often inept, promised agricultural
equipment did not arrive, and Indian selfsu.
ciency remained a pipe dream.

Consequently, by the 1920s assimilation also
seemed to have failed in Canada. Nevertheless,
in both countries education and intermarriage
were having an effect. Some Indians were
merging with the general population, and increasingly,
the products of the much-maligned
schools were playing more important roles on
reservations and reserves. However, the Indians"
tenacity in preserving their cultures
would be rewarded in the 1970s and 1980s
when, in both countries, assimilation gave way
to the new policy of self-determination.